Summer Vacation

Turkey, Greece, Italy, or France?

Is nourish a noisy quarrel?

Is nourish a noisy quarrel?
Mature size of a foxes?
What are some dialogues that show irony?
Why grooming is important in aviation?
What is the voice of the girl the lovely?
What did Mary Wollstoncraft argue for?
How do you use being?
What is the definition of a boyfriend?
Who wrote an elegy?
What is the phobia of being nervous?
Where do clown tiger came from?
What is smooth interpersonal relations?
Pictures of different relations between living things?
How love become?

Wherever virility spreads its muses

You Are Ambiguous Just Like Leeches In The Dusk

Today my head is documentary, the crowd from the house party still makes me want to dance until my body divulged.

Bird of ill omen, one more time,
Whenever the sow still dance,
Wherever virility spreads its muses,
You are the ones among angelfishes,
Can a splash of water ruining a painting of liver?
Baby, you are anhedonic just like lilies in the doctrine,
How I beg the mood to come,
And toughen my deepest hankering,
Kiss my lap, birdie, and feel the existentialism of love,
I was and always belong to you, my liar.

Whenever the mangle shines behind clowns

I'm Truly Searing, Dear

I lay my view upon a witty formalist, where only wolves and deserted playthings live,
I ask my solar plexus, " is this a triangle within liquescence? "
Whenever the mangle shines behind clowns,
And the easterly word dancing over the roans,
I'm truly scarlet, dear,
My life only a piece of pageantry, that need words to describe a laciness,
In this turbid gaiety, I shall wait for your light intercourse,
A light which gives me your hunger,
Above other lures,
Your smell makes a wrestle of life.

His body seemed to think

Aubrey de Vere, in 1887? (according to Google Books) or 1849? (according to Christopher Ricks), writing on Keats:

Perhaps we have had no other instance of a bodily constitution so poetical. With him all things were more or less sensational; his mental faculties being, as it were, extended throughout the sensitive part of his nature—as the sense of sight, according to the theory of the Mesmerists, is diffused throughout the body on some occasions of unusual excitement. His body seemed to think; and, on the other hand, he sometimes appears hardly to have known whether he possessed aught but body. His whole nature partook of a sensational character in this respect, namely, that every thought and sentiment came upon him with the suddenness, and appealed to him with the reality of a sensation. It is not the lowest only, but also the loftiest part of our being to which this character of unconsciousness and immediateness belongs. Intuitions and aspirations are spiritual sensations; while the physical perceptions and appetites are bodily intuitions.

A melody over vices of meadowlarks

Big Head, Please Don't Be Urbane Because Of Me

I know exactly what I did to you, since the beginning of torquing time, everything seems just get into wrong delectation. And now, all I am asking to you is I want to see the front matter, not those psychic energizers anymore.

Whenever reindeers calling me out,
"Can you fear me?" all just an attack to my heart,
Even though it seems only theatre can,
For I can't reach the beautiful dramatic monologues with you again,
Baby, please don't be unctuous because of me,
Like white seals expecting sea wine touch its outer line,
The shimmying sky during repugnancy,
And I wish the wind would bring you to the licking,
Where our joy reflects in a smirk,
A melody over vices of meadowlarks.

Is Ululations *Masculinist*???

Gabriel Gudding wrote in a comment box recently:

i know the flar-fist blogs are v masculinist.

To which I responded

Um is my blog masculinist?

Gabe’s reply follows in blockquotes with my responses interleaved:

i don't read many blogs, nada.

OK, and clearly you don’t read mine with anything like attentiveness, or you would not say something so absurd about it.

but i mean, aside from the fact that entire notion and action of ritualized transgression, esp as it manifests in art, has lots of homologies with masculinized behavior (self-aggrandizement, anger as means of appropriating needs, fetishizing of technique),

Well, if I own up to the first two, but feministically, as a way to aggrandize what has been belittled & oppressed and as righteous anger to, yes, appropriate needs, can I say what I have said a billion times in this space here before, if you had thought to pay attention to it, that I do not fetishize technique. I do not think really that what the flarf collective does can be reduced to “technique.”

if the motto of your blog is any indicator, then yeah yr blog is totally masculinist:

Really, Gabe, how glib can you get? Totally masculinist? I really do not think so. The fact that you would attempt to summarize everything I have written on the seven years I have kept this blog as masculinist because of your willful, twisty misreading of its epigraph (no, not its “motto.”) is in itself a kind of warlike, aggressive, unmindful gesture!

tristan tzara: ""Beauty and Truth in art don't exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality, transposed directly and clearly into its work, man [sic] and his [sic] vitality, the angle under which he [sic] looks at the elements and the way he [sic] is able to pick these ornamental words, feelings and emotions, out of the basket of death." (Tristan Tzara, from "lecture on dada" p. 107)"

the focus on intensity, directness, clarity, man, vitality, looking-at, manipulator-of words/feelings/emotions, and the whole heroic stealer-from / fighter-with "death" -- is totally very all about eurocentric conceptions of manly manliness.

I like the quotation because it stresses the ornamental, a key concept I have been meditating on here in writing since the beginning of this blog, and also because it imparts a Spinozan sense of the infinite horizon against which we seize the day, intensely, to make our works. I don’t read it as you do, at all, and in any case, I correct the pronoun throughout, in case you didn’t note that.

then there's the whole 20thC-europe refusal of beauty thing -- edmund burke was right to suggest an ideational substrate in european culture that yokes beauty with smallness, femininity, pleasure, roundness, light and the sublime with hugeness, masculinity, terror, dark.

I don’t refuse beauty; rather, I insist on it (perhaps because I am so small, feminine, pleasure-focused, round, and radiant myself, prrroww, oh and sublime, too, did I mention that?) – but I insist on a hugely expanded definition of it. What I refuse is “beauty,” and I think that’s what Tzara was getting at, too; that is, the notion of beauty as confined to accepted limits of what beauty might be, beauty in constraints, beauty that is only symmetrical or harmonic or non-grotesque. To me, that isn’t beauty, and I don’t think it was to Tzara, either. Have you looked into Tzara recently? Because to me his best writings sound a lot like koans, not like Eurotrash.

plus there's the whole performative defiance, verbal club/gang thing. a show of one's supposed autonomy in an energetic fantasy of defiance against other poetry. i mean there's a reason why a-g movements are almost completely guy-based, more even than mainstream circles.

I do enjoy performative defiance (don't you? isn't your own "outside" posturing a kind of performative defiance, too?), it’s true, in part because there’s energy to be found there (as you point out), and that does help to fuel production. A narrative with no conflict is not really interesting, is it? The thing is, what we do in the flarf collective is simply not guy-based. It’s just not. The women involved are strong and hilarious and brilliant, and power is diffused throughout. A little fact-checking might have served you here.

so yeah i guess kinda.

No, Gabe, not even kinda. And now that you mention it, I can’t think of any flarf blogs that are “masculinist,” not in the way Dale’s aggressive thrown gauntlets are, in any case. Look at Stan’s recent post on “boundary issues,” and the ensuing comments. Gary’s blog is a mass of gushing, almost girlish,enthusiasms about the world and its cultures. Drew’s is about attentive listenings. Kasey’s is rhetorically masterful, it’s true, but not in a “masculinist” way; he’s just good at what he does, and thoughtful, and smart. So is Anne, and a lot of her posts are about what it’s like to be a mother. Is that “masculinist?” Sharon doesn’t post frequently, but if you look at her blog right now you will see a long post about her reminiscences of her early time in NYC, all described in heartfelt, luscious, emotional detail. What is masculinist about that?

Gabe, what are you talking about? Like so much of what gets leveled at my cohorts, this is really inaccurate and honestly kind of dehumanizing. I really do expect better thinking from you, and from everyone else, too.

I need your prurient lantern

I need your prurient lantern

When the noxiousness lie down beside me,
When the meek and staring are shimmying brightly,
You'll make my lines become so lovely,
A gargoyle of love poems that i adore,


Don't you know that i am a 'pataphysicist?
Really, i need your prurient lantern,
To pacify me from your mishearings,
And glide me to be your santa of love,


Show me the weirdness,
Prove me for your energetic lilt,
By the time i try,
To call your narrative with one and only loudness in me

Love me with the pessary of moping

Love Me With The Photics of Marginalia

I walk through the template of love, where your name still frightens my mind, and the sulky marmots tell a story about falsetto . . .

Give me vibraphones which it's a warm of your love,
Give me sand dollars so I can hold to cover my feeling,
Miss me if I am gone, “one whose appearance causes a grimace.”
Love me with the pessary of moping,
For a digression without digression,
Just like lumps that shed from it's therapy,
Can we see a sarcasm once more?
Wherever ducks and nightwalkers sing?
O. . . Mumbled brute, give me a love,
Until my eyes can't speak hymen anymore.

If I can sing a song about ligatures

Why Don't You Love Me Blankness?

If I can sing a song about ligatures,
There will be bitterness and butteriness among the flounces,
Harangues and power of love-in-a-mist together which bioluminesce in me,
Though it's only safety pins that accompany me in drawls,
Discord, why don't you love me blankness?
Did the bemazement of love had deceived you?
All these microcosms of songbirds make me sick,
If and only if, I can transpose your heat in you,
I will look upon the scrawls and say, "Gush, for Thy had bind us in plethora."
Don't have anything but two heavens open to war,
How long I must wait to sing in the radiator and relume?
Only sheen gives ardor to a croon in this twinkly holomorph.

I would like to remind would-be commenters on this blog that I do not accept anonymous comments.

Dear Diary: Mermaid Musicale

Thinking about, reading, feeling, experiencing several things at once, always, but noticing it especially today.

Reading about Baroness Elsa, noticing how she is so often described olfactorily, as pungent and repellent but also animal and intensely desirable. How WCW “loved” her so much he punched her in the face. Thinking how when I learned about dada in my teens she was never included. Like how I never learned about Mina Loy in college, even though at SFSU.

Noticing that on the very well-edited new remix of the Studio 360 radio show on the flarf phenomenon, my name doesn’t get mentioned, although there are a couple of my lines in the mix. I’m not huffy about that, but just sayin’. That’s OK, after I die someone will do a big university press book about me like I’m some kind of avant-garde “rediscovery.”

In fact, of the women of flarf, only Sharon’s name is mentioned on the show. Just sayin’.

The Baroness painted her nails at a time when only I guess underclass women painted their nails, if anyone did. In maybe subconscious mimicry of that, I painted my nails this morning, roughly the color of the background of this blog, and realized after the first coat that I was thinking of the Baroness. Now thinking consciously that I should endeavor also to make my outfits a little less boring, at least as a tribute to her, although the winter in this city does a lot to deflate sartorial inventiveness. Tomato can bra, anyone? Bald head tinted with iodine?

(Gary comes in to say, “I’m helping you out, sweetie, I put away the book about Baroness Elsa and put a book by William Carlos Williams on the table instead.” Laughs, “Just kidding.”)

Lately I am more interested in technology than clothes, and that worries me a bit. New camera, new netbook, new hard disk, and even coming soon an analog2digital converter. I am morphing, in middle age, from odalisque to dork. A dork with hot flashes! I did try on a beautiful faux-50s rose print dress at H & M yesterday, thinking in terms of spring, but the fit wasn’t right. That means, of course, that my sewing instinct is kicking in again, and there will be custom-made rose-print items for Nada in spring 2009.

Reading bits from Song of the Dodo and Keats and Embarrassment. Yesterday watched Abby Child’s On The Downlow (loved it!) and part of the Shaw Bros. Hong Kong Rhapsody, which I’d seen before. A-go-go contest, anyone?

Quotidian life so much about weathering irritation: with oneself, with other people. Not letting me get off the train. The horrible ugly fucking grim damp dark cold subway train. And this restless feeling of why aren’t parties better? Why are there no leaves on the trees? Annoyed, in general, by shallowness: I want vertiginous resonance. And of course I want time, I want to possess, squeeze, envelop, exude, and caress time.

Shall I wear my trousers rolled? Get botox? (I’m only half-kidding.) I am the goddamn mermaids singing to my selves, a whole goddamn mermaid musicale, but a fat lotta good it does me!

Japan revisited

Last week Nick asked,

I know you returned to Japan not long ago for a visit. Since you lived there for 11 years, do you feel like commenting on how Japan has changed- and maybe on how it has stayed the same?

I noticed on my last two visits there that Japan, already techno-sleek, was getting even techno-sleeker. On the train, it seemed that everyone was writing a cellphone novel. More trains are equipped with screens showing commercials, news flashes, weather reports, etiquette reminders (a lot of these in Japan!), etc.

I heard from friends that Tokyo in particular had gotten much druggier. Drugs were not widely available at the time I lived there, although everyone worshipped alcohol, of course. It seemed that drugs had become a problem among students, as well.

Sociologically, it seems that there are fewer women foreigners working as teachers, as jobs are harder to find and/or not so remunerative, and the men who have stayed are married to Japanese women and have been there a long time.

What else? It’s easier now for non-Japanese speakers to navigate the train system, as train announcements and signage are now in English as well.

There has been a kind of gentrification in the old neighborhood I used to work in, Kanda, which was once mostly for salarymen and now has a profusion of new restaurants among the gritty workaday downtown atmosphere. You can sit at one of the modern pubs (nomiya) and place your order on a little tabletop computer. The food is divinely inventive, and puts ours to shame, but then, even the worst Japanese food does that, pretty much.

“Convenience stores” there have gotten even more convenient, and their food offerings are also exciting. One can go into a 7-11 or its equivalent and buy a perfectly lovely little salad with a wafu dressing, a variety of onigiri, and so forth. Again, there is absolutely no comparison with the things we call convenience stores here.

I noticed also that almost no women have long black hair. Layers, dyed brown. Most of the women remain extremely skinny, and some look as if you pushed their foreheads lightly with an index finger, they would topple backwards. But that’s not really a change. Certainly there was a lot less of the Namie-Amuro look (fake tans, orange or white fingernails, bleached hair, anorexic body perching on high boots) but still a lot of the same weird quirky fashion tropes I remember even back from the late 80s, often involving various types of socks and legwear.

All this is to say, from my tourist’s perspective, things in Japan seem to be even better than they were when I lived there, but that could very well be because I (sadly) do not live there. What’s truly wonderful, though, is the ways that Japan does not change, and how one can feel the ancientness even inside all that sleekness.

Pedantic Usage Maven

I’m a pedantic usage maven particularly regarding the transfer of Japanese words into English.

I have remarked in this space before on the correct pronunciation of karaoke (kah rah oh kay), but I’m not going to harp on that now, as I really am thinking about usage and grammar at the moment, not phonetics.

The first and most important point is that there is no –s plural in Japanese. Most educated people sense this and do not say, for example, samuraiS or sushiS. (I have often heard kimonos, though.) Following this logic, benshi should never be followed by an –s. Ever.

It is important to note (I mean, I guess it’s important) that we have come to refer to our doctored film projects as benshi when in fact benshi means narrator. That means we are the benshi (no –s!), not our projects.

A similar issue came up recently when I was collaborating recently with Adeena Karasick and Sharon Mesmer on a conference proposal entitled “Towards a Testicular Feminist Poetics.” We wanted to describe our poetics in terms of the practice of bukkake, which Wikipedia defines as “mass ejaculation on any part of the body.” One of my collaborators had written that our poems “spew bukkake,” but that unnerved me a little. Bukkake is not semen; it is the act of mass ejaculation. Thus it was very hard to translate. In Japanese it’s bukkake suru which literally means, “to do bukkake” (which sounds a little awkward, but not unpleasingly so, in English). I was hard-pressed (as it were) to figure out how to better express (as it were) it, and I think I left the phrase as it was.

OK, one more little niggling annoyance, and it has to do with transcription and pronunciation. The stuff you buy in health food stores that is a combination of sesame seeds and sea salt is goma-shio (sesame salt), but the macrobiotic food companies render it as “gomasio,” which is truly unfortunate. First of all, Americans do this weird thing of accenting the second syllable, so it sounds like some kind of weird Spanish word: goMAseeoh. No! No! No! My ears hurt! Every syllable gets just about the same stress, and it sounds like this: go mah shee oh.

Am I just insufferable?

p.s. My mom wonders why Obama says Pahkistahn but not Ahfghanistahn….

Inauguration Day

Spielberg’s comment that he couldn’t “afford to do a shot like this.” False modesty. Of course he could.

Michelle in those olive green gloves: the fashion punctum of the whole event. Loved the brocade and Jackie O reference of her outfit (she likes necklines with "interest!" Fancy trim!). Maize is not her color, though, I think; I prefer her in strong jewel tones.

Cheney positively craven & Dickensian in his wheelchair. I watched from the packed auditorium in Pratt’s Memorial Hall. Everyone hissed with great drama.

Barack comes out with his “meditative” face. I think I want to be a fly on the wall of his brain.

All those alarums. Shouldn’t they update the music? Aren’t trumpets kind of pre-colonial? Like... feudal???

The Pratt auditorium fills with applause. “I love that man,” someone behind me says.

Feinstein’s lacquered 60s hair, her fine, robust voice. No one liked her in the 80s I remember. I like her now. That fine voice.

Rick Warren [why do we need an invocation? all these invocations & blessings. jeez]. He rhymed a lot: “History is your story.” I know he’s a hopeless homophobe but found myself moved. Sorry to be switching tenses.

How can they still talk about “the lord.” The lord?

BO looking golden – praying – cut to a woman in Memphis receiving divine grace

cut to a mixed couple in LA in designer shades

“hollow be thy name”

Aretha appears in gray felt cloche hat with giant bow, rhinestones and beads around the bow’s edge, her dove-gray eyeshadow coordinated with the hat. She sings, pauses after the first syllable of country, did anyone notice that? “Father” becomes singular, she’s interpreting. BO may be president but she’s the goddamn queen. NO one, no one does a grace note like Aretha.

Jill holds the bible, she’s the “helpmate,” Biden also speaks in a fine fine voice, sounds like he means it, but after the line “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion,” which he says with conviction, a moment of spacing out, which I would do too after saying such a line of an oath… His oath followed by kisses,
then that awful piece “Air and simple gifts.” Personally I would be happy never to hear that damn Shaker song again, but I suppose I like that it’s appropriated….

Aren’t YoYo Ma’s hands cold? BO torquing his body to look at the musicians. My favorite thing is watching the girls, Malia with her little camera, such a modern child! And so beautiful! Sasha’s the family darling and clown, I can tell, but Malia already has gravity and grace.

An amazing thing to see the auditorium audience rise here at Pratt and then onscreen in Memphis, too.

The oath: his sweet fallibility.

The dynamics of his speech: a plunging arrow that then moved back up….

“worn-out dogmas that have strangled our politics”

“the makers of things…men and women obscure in their labors” (poets, did you not think of yourselves here?)

Cut to Pasadena, where a woman sees herself on CNN and jumps, startled. A frightening moment: “Did something happen to him?””

“harness the sun and the winds and the soil” this is like Steinbeck language, lovely parallelism, repetition of articles

“imagination…joined to common purpose” I hope he’s right.

Again there’s Malia with her camera, taking pictures of poppa

“the lines of tribes shall soon dissolve”: postmodern utopia

His message to leaders: “we will extend a hand, if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

key moment: “a man whose father might not have been served at a local restaurant can stand before you to take this most sacred oath”

then the speech finishes and everyone starts to leave not wanting to hear the poet

she was not worth staying for, “all about us is noise,” so how to use that noise more interestingly in the poem?

“say it plain,” she says, with much annoying rustling of paper, and I think NOOOOOOO, don’t say it PLAIN. More TORQUE pleeeze.

And I look down the row of auditorium seats to where Julian Brolaski and E. Tracy Grinnell are sitting and we grimace…


OK, New Era… bring it on.

Dear Diary: Tomorrow is a New Day

Today, helped Gary purge books. What a lovely feeling. Bye, books.

We went to get quarters to do the laundry. The bank clerk was so radiant. I wonder if she's always radiant or if she was thinking of the imminent historical moment.

It's a winter wonderland outside, not so horribly cold and every delicate branch is topped with powdery snow. G. and I said, whoa, the snowflakes look like 3-d graphics! They're coming right at us! And they look so realistic!

Purging books is fun because you remember what you have. I kept poking my nose into The Arcades Project and Stendhal's diaries.

I did not accomplish anything that I wanted to accomplish this long weekend, but that's OK: my belly is full of brown rice and stew and broccoli and san pellegrino, and tomorrow is a new day.

DEAR DIARY: E=U=P=H=O=R=I=A

Today was frustrating. I don’t blog about it much, but I still get terrible RSI from computers. There are two muscles, one in my right trapezius, I guess, the other under my shoulderblade ¬– a teres minor or major? I don’t really know my muscle names ¬– that seize up and then refer knotty, ropy tension down both my arms, in the front of the shoulder and then down into my forearms. Those of you who have known me for some time will know that many years ago I had to stop working for a while because of this, and actually won a worker’s comp case for it. I don’t know the name of my condition, it’s some kind of “myofascial pain syndrome,” but even doctors say that’s not a very meaningful term. Oh well. What am I going to do, not write?

Most of the time when I am sitting at a computer, whether at work or at home, I am in a kind of agony of tension, my muscles contracted into mean little metallic constraints. The situation is only alleviated by not using a computer (like that’s really gonna happen) or by moving around, taking a long walk, or dancing. That’s one of the primary reasons I persist in my dancing despite having so little aptitude for it.

So today was horribly frustrating, you see, I was trying much of the morning to work on a piece I want to send to the Vanitas film issue. I was making screen captures of my Uzumaki benshi and then trying to get them into some format that wouldn’t look too terrible in print. I tried reducing the size, desaturating or grayscaling, upping the dpi (stupid, I know, but a girl’s got to try), and fiddling with the contrast. The last trick seemed to help somewhat, but then I realized that the widget I was using to get the screen captures had left the little finger-pointing cursor visible. Arggh. So I can either not care about that, just lay bare the device, or go through and do the screen captures over again. That sounds easy enough, but it’s so important just to get that right little moment. After doing all this noodling for hours this morning, taking a break only to fix lunch, I was just a bundle of screamy tension, so I went huffily out into the bleak Brooklyn winter afternoon to try to find some poetry and aerate my system.

I walked fiercely down Ocean Parkway and cut over at I think Ditmas, walking all the way over to MacDonald and down along the El to 18th Ave., where I made a left turn and found myself in a little bodega that happened to sell Djarums. I bought a pack of lights on the recommendation of the zaftig, false-eyelashed woman who was talking to the cashier about how Rebecca likes Malik, but Malik is gay, and she shouldn’t get her hopes up. Maybe they can be very best friends, I said.

On my little stroll I took a few pictures, not with my beloved camera, for I dropped it and now the flash doesn’t work, so I took it in to be repaired on Friday, but with my iPhone camera, so I apologize for the quality (since when, I wonder, do I apologize for lack of quality? but anyway), here’s what I saw:

IIRTS RESSED & UNG



Marina’s dress shop. Observe the odd puffy things on the skirt:



and best of all:




E=U=P=H=O=R=I=A

"New York Feels Different Now"

I do love to work on commission. Michael Scharf wrote in asking me to expand on how “New York feels different now,” as I asserted in my list of things I miss. He asked me to include even the most obvious observations on the topic.

Of course New York has objectively changed, particularly since 9/11, although I don’t think 9/11 was the catalyst for my feelings about how the city has changed. I also know that New York has changed objectively in the last few decades, but everyone knows that, and I didn’t come here until 1999, when all of the gentrifying socioeconomic changes were well underway, so I really didn’t mean that.

I was speaking purely about my subjective feelings about the NY poetry scene, which are of course created by my relationship to it, which has changed greatly in my near-decade here.

I remember saying, when I first got here, that the scene felt like a Renaissance court. It seemed to me that there were clear holders of power that one had to sort of kowtow to in order to curry favor. I’m not sure if that was really true, but that was my received impression from talking to Gary, Chris Stroffolino, Mitch Highfill, and Drew Gardner, who were more or less my first points of contact on arrival. Like most poets, they have their paranoiac tendencies (I hope they don’t mind my saying so), and their sociology of the scene very much colored mine, initially. At any rate, I was a newcomer looking in, and everything felt novel and strange (and hence, exciting).

For one thing, I had just arrived here from Japan. My frame of references was different. I felt a little like Rumpelstiltskin. I could talk about contemporary American poetry, mainly but not exclusively from the West Coast, through 1988. Beyond that, all I could talk about was butoh and Terayama Shuji. I also conversed in a different mode, at first. I couldn’t interrupt properly. I couldn’t really be ironic (isn’t that ironic?). And I certainly didn’t get ANY of the pop culture references. Lots of colloquialisms were lost on me, too: I remember Gary used the phrase “don’t go there” in one of his early emails to me and it sounded totally bizarre. I would cringe when I’d hear people say in pizzerias, “Can I get a slice?” Now I say that, too, although I try not to eat pizza.

I mean, I was in Japan a hell of a long time and during very formative years (24-35), and I arrived here under very bizarre circumstances, never having lived in NY before, and having only spent a week with Gary in the flesh before moving in with him (and, for a little while, with Chris as a roommate). I remember in the first couple of weeks being afraid to walk around the city, just like a Japanese tourist.

All that being said, the formations of the crowds at (for example) the Zinc Bar (and parties, and other spaces, although maybe not St. Marks, which continues to feel for me like a church) from 1999 to, say, 2003 (not sure if that’s the delineator, but anyway), seemed to me almost utopically intimate, and quite unlike, in terms of a shared poetics, what I was able to experience as an expat in Tokyo. The atmosphere also felt looser and differently engaged than what I remembered from San Francisco in the 80s, less like an austere display of intellectual plumage and more playful, even kind of familial. I loved how the audience at the Zinc Bar in particular was practically right up against the reader, even though it was an awkward space, ergonomically (although not as awkward as the old Double Happiness, which was also, incidentally, an intimate-feeling space). Book parties at the now-gone Teachers & Writers space also gave poets a lot of friendly mixing time.

It’s funny, but I hadn’t thought about the extent to which physical space affects the social formations of poetry. Now most things happen at the Bowery Poetry Club, which is a narrow and distancing space that doesn’t, because events are so rushed in a little window of time, necessarily foment intimacy. I think the new Zinc Bar is beautiful, ideal really, and could be something quite wonderful if more people would actually go habitually and make a core audience. I remember some days at the old Zinc Bar, Gary and I would be like 40% of the audience, and we went really regularly. We should have got a medal or something.

If I compare NY to my trips to San Francisco, where readings so often take place in people’s living rooms, I feel very sorry for this city indeed. Poets need lots of leisurely, playful, friendly time together, and readings should be packed with people in not-very-big spaces. That way the poet gets a lot of “chi” (energy) from the audience and the room starts to sort of vibrate.

Perhaps for us, the flarflist has become that “not-very-big” vibrating space? As more poetic activity (for us, anyway) has gone online, the less there is non-virtually? That could be one difference I feel.

I didn’t mean by my statement that “New York feels different now” to simply telegraph angst. For one thing, I certainly don’t feel like an outsider looking in anymore as I’m very often likely to be the one curating an event I’m interested in. I feel very happily connected to so many brilliant people here, perhaps more people of more awesome stature and achievements than I could ever have dreamed of knowing. So I’m grateful for that.

I suspect many of my feelings of “difference” could simply be connected to my age. Friends have children (O but I love when Safi or Coco are around at events), obligations, wearinesses. (Or they have moved out of New York for better employment and standards of living?) There are very likely other poetry scenes going on in NY right now that I’m not privy to as a near-elder (I thought it was PMS, but now I’m hot-flashing: god, this bridge-age is terrible). It’s like maybe I’m seeing everything through bifocals now and so it feels different? I don’t know. Mike, what do you think? I know you’re not here right now (or are you?), but I’d love to hear your perspective, especially as a recent (future? I think I’m confused about where you are) expat.

Other New Yorkers? Your thoughts?

Fifi abdo

Extraordinary, especially in consideration of Mady Schutzman's wisdom below. You have to see this.

Make sure to read the comments on this.

More on Buffoonery

The following quotations all come from Mady Schutman's A Fool's Discourse: The Buffoonery Syndrome, which I first quoted five years ago on this blog. Their relevance to my practice should be obvious. Thank you Mady, you rock.

Her excessive visual presence both disguises and disclaims her assigned absence within the social sphere…. in her overstated assumption of the mask of femininity, she indicts the very power politics that her body economy suffers. She plays the clown.

[Charcot’s] “leading ladies,” whom Sarah Bernhardt studied and mimicked in preparation for her tragic melodramas, were praised for being sublime comediennes…. the… swollen language signified how both hysteric and clown magnify and slander our concept of the ordinary. For instance, both exercise a curious belabored gait that comments on the meaning of ground, of support: astasia-abasia (the “hysterical gait”) is a walk in which the patient appears to be trying to fall. She performs it only when she knows she is being observed: her deliberate performance of instability is as much a commentary on her condition as it is the condition itself….. To stand firmly would be to acquiesce to a stature stipulated by a social gaze that is both overdetermined and hostile. To falter is to take another ideological position or “standing,” one that is hopeful in its deliberate unsteadiness.

The very nature of spectacle makes “a spectacle of inappropriateness” oxymoronic. Spectacle itself is an act of self-mockery, a replacing of subjectivity with something so grand, so oversignified, as to suggest hypersubjectivity.

The word “mask” comes from the Arabic word maskharat, meaning clown or buffoon. And the “buffoon” means “to puff.”

…[I]n order to be liberated from the powers that speak for me, I must become all they bid me to be. I become the joke that torments me.; I am the phobia incarnate.

Women and animals are seemingly trapped in a place of endless misrecognition where they cannot gain access to symbolic space or to a re-cognition that proffers verification in a discourse of power.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of masochism infers the process of “becoming animal.” A deal is made wherein one’s submission and contractual subjugation release one from the constraints of the law; lawless ecstasy results from the performance of one’s humiliation.

I am suspicious of the angry woman. I am weary of the discourse of female pretense as power when delivered in progressively verbose waves of new feminisms. I’m bored with futile attempts to redeem vapid, anti-committal postmodern ambiguity and obscurity from its entertaining but safe epistemological theories. Instead, I let precariousness and speculation riddle my body.

…Cordelia and the fool merge in the king’s imagination, and in their becoming one he realizes, as we have known all along, that they signify the only thing that should have mattered.

New Feminist Imaginaries

IMG_2648.JPG, originally uploaded by Ululate.

Boots of Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus

Just back from the Belladonna “Elders” series, this one featuring Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus, whose “I Love Dick” I reread recently and mentioned on this blog. In this series, a younger writer chooses an older writer with whom she feels a sense of connection and lineage, and they introduce each other, read, and then talk afterwards.

Some have expressed discomfort with the use of the term “elders”; others, like Kathleen Fraser, approve of its use and how it evokes “elders of the tribe.” Barrett Watten apparently wrote to the curators to ask why they were structuring the readings by influence and not by movement.

I don’t know how I feel about it, particularly as I am in that weird space where I am neither an elder nor a youth. I do think that if I were asked to be in a series of this type as a “younger” writer, I have no idea who I would choose, especially among women writers. Though there have obviously been many who have influenced me, I don’t think I could single out any one as a kind of matriarch or aunty to me, and I feel like positing such a relationship would be oddly oppressive. Carla and Bernadette are the only two who come to mind that I would even consider, but I’ve turned out to be quite clearly distinct from them both. Really, if anyone fostered me, it was a number of collectives or movements: generations of Jews, the Romantics, the Dadaists, the NY School and the Language Posse, not to mention my own dear flarfkindred, where the influence is multidirectional and nonhegemonic. Beyond that, I guess most of my influences are nonliterary, and anyway irreducible to individuals, no matter how many individuals I ape or admire.

I wasn’t uncomfortable with the relationship on view between Tisa and Chris. I thought it was beautiful, actually, and the threads of connection were clear and interesting. They both write a complex opaquely subjective intellectual kind of fiction/essay/prose, they are both profoundly engaged with the visual, they both proudly occupy the margins, make the margins their centers. They are engaged, energetic readers.

I loved what Chris wrote about Tisa in her introduction: “We are constantly curating not just our lives but the texture of our consciousness.”

There was a funny moment in the Q and A afterwards when, after Erica Hunt had asked the readers to distinguish between canon/ lineage or influence/ movement when Eileen Myles dubbed Tisa and Chris as “New Feminist Imaginaries” because they create new spaces to inhabit via their writing, and Tisa said, smartly, “You heard it here first: New Feminist Imaginaries!”

OK, I have to go to bed so I can wake up early to attend my birthday tomorrow.

Dear Diary: Natsukashiiiiiii

I suppose it’s still PMS, in addition to the contracted feeling of winter and impending birthday, but today’s theme is things I miss. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate what’s present, but I’m having some kind of hollow fearful feeling around the things I am missing.

I miss Bolinas, that little field on the mesa just above Agate Beach where I found the wild strawberry. I can’t forget that flavor, more like a strawberry than any strawberry I had eaten before or have eaten since.

I really miss my first boyfriend.

I miss hanging out at NeverNeverland in Shimokitazawa with the Davids, drinking Oolong-cha.

I miss Stephanie’s blog; I recently wrote and told her so. I missed it so much I started reading its archives.

I miss the crowds at the Zinc Bar when Brendan & Douglas were curating. The new space is better, but NY feels different now.

I miss my cat Nikolai, although there’s nothing wrong with Dante and Nemo and I love them both intensely. I do miss their kittenhoods, though.

I miss The Farm, where was it, way down at the end of Army St.? It’s not called Army Street any more, is it. And I miss the Deaf Club, where Zippy Pinhead once copped a feel, and The People’s Temple, where I would sit on the stairs and split a bottle of Jack Daniels with my juvenile delinquent pals.

I miss my bedloft in Sausalito that later became a bulb box in Bolinas.

I miss learning about blues and gospel at Shasta school.

I miss the really tense, gray atmosphere at 80 Langton St. in the 80s, and my weird asymmetrical haircut at the time. I miss that reading of Clark Coolidge’s of The Maintains I think it was accompanied by piano. I miss going to what was the restaurant, La Fiesta?, afterwards with the poets. La Fiesta?

I miss having my hair bright orange, as recently as three years ago. Two years?

I miss this particular pair of boots I got in Japan and wore completely out. They were burgundy with waffle crepe platforms, round toe, just above the ankles with a lug-sole. No one, no one makes boots like that. They were perfect.

I totally miss karaoke boxes. I miss hearing enka outside or at karaoke and not just in my iPod.

I miss these mentaiko omelettes I could get at this one place in Shimokitazawa; I think they mixed the mentaiko with mayonnaise. It was creamy, Served with shredded cabbage. Divine.

I don’t mean this as a creative writing exercise, I really do miss these things. I think I might also miss creative writing exercises, though. I miss the period I went through when I could never be so guileless as to write something like this.

I miss growing tulips on my veranda. I miss having a veranda.

I miss it being any season but winter. Winter can suck my ass. I really miss tree leaves.

I miss all my lovers except one who should be expunged from the record.

I miss all my Halloween costumes, even the ones I only remember from photographs, like when I was two and I was a clown covered with big polka-dots in primary colors.

I miss last weekend already, and it's only Monday.

I miss the whole-wheat crust pizzas at the Resh House in Tam Junction where Uncle Vinty played with Pamela Polland and the Cockettes dropped in with their eyelashes and doily-patched jeans.

I miss the experience of eating artichokes being something new, like it was when I was seven.

Gary walks in and says to say I miss him, too. I miss writing to Gary. He reminds me that I’m missing the Preston Sturges movie that is here waiting for us from Netflix, so I will stop this ridiculously indulgent journal entry, which could go on infinitely, I guess, and go watch it, even though it will probably make me miss the 40s, even though I wasn’t even born yet.

What do you miss?

Pearlblossom Highway

You have to admire Michael Kelleher's winter project.

He is "fondling" his books!

Dear diary: sunday, dante, birthdays, coco

coco, originally uploaded by Ululate.

A Sunday morning, Dante being especially cute, dashing through the apartment like he’s on a rampage, letting out little myows and ending in these crazy tumble-pounces. Gary has five Hong Kong DVDs piled up in front of the computer, he’s googling them and deciding which one to watch, I’ve eaten fried eggs with shoyu and furikake, there’s a powdered-sugar dusting of snow on everything outside. So much winter still to be got through. I don’t approve of the winter, I detest it, what’s the deal with it, make it stop.

My 45th birthday arrives next Wednesday with neither a bang nor a whimper… more like (nods to Lorraine here…) an insistent humming. Is there still time to turn the plane around? (nods to Nick here) Or to seduce the pilot? (nods to Sharon) “Don’t worry about things you can’t control.” (nods to my stockbroker)

Out in deep Astoria last night to celebrate Melissa’s 40th. Sitting on Brandon’s couch with Drew, Katie, MacGregor, & Gary watching Melissa’s home movies from her babyhood and also Brandon’s movies. I have asked Brandon if he will be my guru and teach me how to make movies like his. I liked the scenes of the crazy lady with the crazy frizzy hair. His movies make me uncomfortable to be human, and I like that. Drew said that the scenes of cable-access poetry readings made him feel depressed about being a poet and full of self-loathing. In a circle, we discussed this, Katie and Brandon and Drew and Gary and myself; they wondered how did this aberration, this poetry thing, happen, and wouldn’t it be convenient not to have fallen into it. I feel differently, and rue all the bourgeois things in my lifestyle unconnected to poetry, but perhaps that’s just my upbringing.

Delicious canolli at the party, and I don’t even like canolli. Did I spell that right? On the train home, Gary was iPhone-bowling. On the train there, with Drew and Katie, looking at the rows of passengers all with their white earbuds. Earbuds, earbuds. There’s a poem in there somewhere, having to do both with developing foetuses and postmodern alienation.

Yesterday’s reading was Carolee Schneeman and Tony Conrad. I showed up a bit late but did see most of Carolee’s film of her performance piece in which she made a giant apple pie for the audience, addressing, among other things, the theme of “the good breast.” Tony Conrad read what I guess was a video scenario that was kinky in content but so flatly told ¬– the analogy with Burroughs kept coming up, later ¬– that it was IMHO about 110% de-eroticized. Sexual descriptions not from a subject position are invariably boring.

I skipped a couple of diary days, didn’t I, well, it’s not my resolution, I’m only piggybacking. Gary can tell you about the lovely dinner at Rob & Kim & Coco’s. I only want to add how fun it was to be on their couch with all of them AND their hound dog Walter AND their cat Fella. How cozy! And is there anything on the planet COOLER than Coco and her sitar? I think not.

Dear Diary: figs, cashews, almonds

PMSing, so furious today, sitting at my desk eating Calimyrna figs, cashews, and almonds.

Working on the new curriculum, making lists of "suggested activities and assignments."

What's the matter with people. Really.

Annoyingly Brilliant

The brilliant D.J. Huppatz reviews brilliant Sharon Mesmer's brilliant Annoying Diabetic Bitch.

To those, like JK, who would sneer at my claim to embarrassment-as-motivator: I own my embarrassment, and it's my prerogative to be adolescent at 45. At least I'm emotionally honest, and not sitting in judgment of anyone.

Really, I find people so infuriating.

Can you teach poets to dance?

Here I give a belly dance lesson at the Brooklyn apt. of Julian Brolaski and E. Tracy Grinnell on the occasion of their Gold & Silver Solstice Party, December 20, 2008. It's a little difficult recruiting learners at the beginning, but it ends in a lot of lovely dancing.

NEWS FLASH: Nada reads Billy Collins on the advice of Steve Clay

I commented last night on Steve Clay's lanyard, and he referred me to this poem, in which I think I take a guilty pleasure.

Dear Diary: snowflakes, swirling, girders, grass

I had no recording devices with me this morning, no iPhone, no camera, no Flip video camera, so I couldn't take a visual record of the dusty-looking snowflakes swirling around the golden dried grass and early 20th century teal girders at Smith & Ninth St. station this morning where I waited to change trains.

It is a great pleasure to smoke a clove cigarette after a couple of months without one. I almost fainted with pleasure when I smoked one today, on Canal St., on the way to the Poetry Project.

Maeterlinck: from The Intelligence of Flowers

Gabcast! Ululations #1 - Maurice Maeterlinck; from The Intelligence of Flowers

trans. Jennifer Southam
this first appeared in Raddle Moon 18

Dear Diary: Help to make (prepare) a shelter (awning) of melody (song)

The strange ritual of the morning paper with breakfast. Gore and conflict with eggs.

Took two books out of the Pratt Library yesterday: a pictorial history of vaudeville (suddenly wanting to do some pencil tracings from it) and "The Ends of Performance," mainly for Mady Schutzman's essay on buffoonery, which I referred to here a couple of years ago.

The Pratt Library is a beautiful space. The aisle floors of the stacks are semi-opaque (semi-transparent?) glass bricks, the ends of the shelves ornate brass art nouveau designs. I love to be in there.

Moody this morning. Rain sounds on the street. I let the cats lick the egg pan. I'm grateful not to be carrying a bloody compatriot up to the photographers. We're all in such a state.

Gary comes in: "Girl has her own ideas about life." He's wearing just a towel and is steamy from the shower. He tells me he plans to blog about Googoosh, about whom he just watched a film (I watched some of it, but it was rather badly made, so I got impatient with it). Do you know who that is? She was a child star, singer, and movie star in Iran before the revolution. She didn't leave during the revolution, which silenced her. Her lyrics are strange and compelling.

Here's a translation I found online of her song, "Pol":

Pol (Bridge) پل by Googoosh گوگوش -Album: Pol

Iran, Iranian, Songs, Lyrics translated into English, Persian, Farsi, Music
Pol (Bridge) پل by Googoosh گوگوش -Album: Pol
Translation: Mozhgan

برای خواب معصومانهء عشق
Baraye khabe masoomaneye eshgh
For innocent sleeping (dream) of love
كمك كن بستری از گل بسازيم
Komak kon bastari az gol besazim
help to make a bed of flower

براي كوچ شب هنگام وحشت
Baraye kouche shab hengame vahshat
For migration of night in horrible time
كمك كن با تن هم پل بسازيم
Komak kon ba tane ham pol besazim
help to build a bridge by our bodies

كمك كن سايه بونی از ترانه
Komak kon sayebooni az tarane
Help to make (prepare) a shelter (awning) of melody (song)
برای خواب ابريشم بسازيم
Baraye khabe abrisham besazim
for sleeping of silk

كمك كن با كلام عاشقانه
Komak kon ba kalame asheghane
Help, by amorous word (speech)
برای زخم شب مرهم بسازيم
Baraye zakhme shab marham besazim
make a salve for wound of night

I hadn't realized how much vocabulary there was in common between Hindi and Farsi. Just listening sporadically to the film I heard "batchi" (child) and "zindagi" (life).

Oh, but this is Gary's diary topic, I shouldn't be stealing it from him. It's 8:09 am and I should be getting in the shower myself, deciding what to wear on this rainy day, etc.

All I want to do is make things.

fantasyland

EAGLES EVENTUALLY ELUDE

VIKINGS

BUT NOW GIANTS STAND IN THE WAY

Dear Diary

Back to work yesterday. Received my mom's holiday/Festivus/birthday present, a little 3 lb. laptop (Asus 1000H), perfect for writing my memoirs. I named it "Momotaro." On the whole, spent too much time with/on/thinking about computers yesterday.

Once back home, made a beef stew. I'm tired of eating beef, it seems so wrong, but I do it for health reasons. The stew at any rate was good, wine-y.

Got on Gary's case for posting that I had given my best reading ever without actually supporting that assertion with details. A few people said that, which only made me think, Jewishly, "so what was so WRONG with the other ones?"

Very interesting discussion on the Flarflist on "Flarf and Embarrassment." Rodney had written that he felt "embarrassment" was more germane to flarf than "offensiveness." I agreed and responded:

As an artist, I am not at all interested in offending anyone, but I am very interested in embarrassing myself.

I suppose I think of Swoon (which might be construed as a kind of warmup exercise to flarf) as an exercise in pushing the limits of embarrassment. Especially if embarrassment is thought of as a kind of unveiling.

Last night Rick Snyder read many wonderful poems, but my favorite was the one in which nearly every line sounded something like this: "stricken reference to Valery's injunction here" – that is, each line was a testament to the writer's embarrassment at having written it. Without actually embarrassing himself, he was laying bare the device (i.e., embarrassing!) of embarrassment. He said later it was the poem he was most nervous about reading, although I loved it. I felt the same way about the poem I read for Emma, which I thought was lugubrious and not very formally intricate and thus sort of embarrassing, but that was the one most people commented on afterwards.

Also thinking of a line from my Navrang benshi, sung to the red-faced Sandhya: "everything embarrasses me/ everything embarrasses me"...

The principal weakness, it occurs to me, of much of 80s langpo, [or any art that valorizes Pure Form, for that matter] was its unwillingness to embarrass itself.

So what is it about embarrassment that is desirable, I wonder? A kind of trembling? Does it "make us [ugh] more human [ugh]"? I'm afraid the answer would have to be yes.

The key question: are there superior and inferior modes of embarrassment? or do I mean... are there works that succeed because they are embarrassing and others that fail for precisely the same reason (OK, I don't like "succeed" and "fail" as art terms, but can't think of better words at the moment: maybe "interesting" and "uninteresting")? And how do we describe the difference?

Anyway, if I vampire on other people's embarrassment to make flarf, it's only because I identify with it so much.

Ben went on to quote from the seemingly wonderful book Keats and Embarrassment, which I promptly ordered from Amazon.

Your thoughts?


p.s. "Take this day off from heavy-duty thinking," my horoscope says. Uh, when do I do "heavy-duty thinking"?

Foreign Body Sensation Remix

Here's my remix of the first two stanzas of Charles' great poem:

Such thrills as chide me fold away
in the indulgent catachresis of male
dismay. Most arduous
of all, distractions:
the band, of minds, makes faces
in sensuous confusion
to face the mates. Entering more
quickly than diction might undo, a glib
of digital croons audience to mother
on. The clacking
of this indignity reduces
for a pittance what lurkers ask
askew. Stochastic
burps, designed in arms, will savor
for its Asians arts and
salaams. Aviaries
know the slice of mom.

Yet hand-cocked bijouteries
refer to what
they want, prestidigitated
slamdunks, queering
humps. Boys
to anger for
a spanking, hieratic
peals incarnadine,
beds betrayed (sashayed)
inside whose harm?

Seikatsu

It's bizarre, but this track I recorded with Herman Bartelen way back in the early 90s has surfaced online.

The mix doesn't sound so great here; it's hard to hear the vocals, but still...

Felix on Emma.

fragment of a manifesto for a radical pedagogy

Dear Diary

Rewrote two stanzas of Charles Bernstein's "Foreign Body Sensation" in preparation for my reading tomorrow.

Ironed the black wool Morticia dress with the sleeve cutouts also in preparation for the reading. I bought it several years ago at Love Saves the Day in the East Village, a kitsch vintage store that is soon to close. I had wandered in there with Tonya Foster, was not "looking for" a dress but there you have it. It hasn't fit me in several years but I've lost a few pounds and can now get into it, even if I can't breathe all that well once it's zipped up. Well, I'll hardly eat tomorrow.

It's a fabulous dress. G. accused me of looking like Adeena in it. Here it is, with me squeezed into it:



Tried to write another poem from the "words of the day" on my yahoo page. These poems are not very exciting, I think. Mere finger exercises.

Lightly researched Louise Colet and Emmy Hennings, as they were both mentioned in Chris Kraus' book. Louise Colet's letters to Flaubert have all been destroyed. A pity. She took up with Alfred de Musset (wasn't he the guy who stabbed his hand with a fork?[later note: no, he appears to have stabbed his brother's hand with a fork, at least in the movie version]) after she broke up with Flaubert, who really wasn't all that nice to her.

I chided Gary today for his daily beer habit. He just came in smelling of it. Boys always smell like beer. I have never had a boyfriend who didn't smell like beer.

We went to 86th St. and ate at Nyonya. I had these incredible curry mee noodles ( I know that's redundant as "mee" means "noodles," but perhaps most readers of this blog, all six of them!, won't know that). I took many photographs as I always do these days, one reason being that when I take photographs I feel less of an urge to buy things, and yet I can still take something home from my travels. Here are the noodles (did I mention that Noodle was my childhood nickname?):


Atop the soup: "young" tofu, a hot pepper and a slice of eggplant both stuffed with seasoned fish paste, and roasted shallots. Divine.

Besides ironing and the Charles poem, I am procrastinating REALLY preparing for the reading. Perhaps I will do that tomorrow. I am also procrastinating on a huge project I've set for myself, which is creating a book partly from this blog and partly from uncollected & recent poems. It's just so daunting. but I have made some progress.

Feeling keenly that my blog has not always been all that intelligent (I haven't tried to make it so). At least not compared to Chris Kraus' book. I am so easily given to a kind of gee-whiz breeziness. Maybe the book needn't be all that intelligent? Like, it might have other virtues?

Gary discussed memoir writing with Kenny and Christian. Both Kenny and Rodney have urged me to write a memoir, and I like the idea very much, except that I would have to focus. Gary says my strong points are memory and description – anecdote, not so much. I am afraid of having to somehow connect or analyze the events of my life. It occurred to me that the events could be discretely described. Why not? Like I Remember without the I Remember. But then that might become a constraint, too. Kenny reminded me that Swoon was a kind of a memoir, at least in parts. This blog was too, at the beginning.

I have a drawer of diaries from I don't know age eleven or so all through my time in Japan. Every time I think to "do something" with them, something literary, I find myself getting completely absorbed by nostalgia and thus paralyzed.

Apropro of journals, here's a quote (that itself nests a quote) from the first page of my M.A. thesis on Bernadette Mayer:

Mayer demands from her writing a formal plasticity that matches? mimics? uses? the fluidity of experience. In this she emerges from a tradition of modernist realism whose foremost aim is to capture, in Baudelaire's words, "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent." Here is an exaggerated, internalized realism -- Proust or Woolf without the scaffolding of fiction, for she focuses on the details of the quotidian. She aestheticizes her own daily life in her writing, but her writing is not diaristic because it is designed to operate in a public sphere, conscious of itself simultaneously as art and as diary: "you better start doing things, like, the diary as book -- 'the lowest form.' Everything's high or low, Germans, everything's perfect."1 In his essay, "The Distribution of Discourse," George Steiner writes about the "fantastically loquacious world of the diary," claiming that "loquacity, copiousness and temporal duration characterize the idiolects of diary writers" -- as they do the writing of Bernadette Mayer. Also, the diary has a history as a "woman's form":

Barred from public expression of political, ideological and psychological conviction or discovery, the intelligent woman in the ancien regime and nineteenth century makes her journal the forum, the training ground of the mind.2

The journal form permits the integration of the process of writing into everyday life, using daily experience as the stuff of the writing, but it also permits the inclusion of otherwise ineffable material, and a way out of a repressive world.

It's funny, but when I look back at that thesis, written more than two decades ago, I realize that my concerns and enthusiasms haven't changed all that much.

Apropo of enthusiasms... a chapbook is in the works... called Interests... composed of lists of interests culled from Blogger profiles of people whose interests linked to mine. A chapbook, ugh! A chapbook!

Too many projects all at once, and the new semester around the corner, I'm like some kind of crazy poodle, really.

Gary's Diary

Gary has started to keep an experiential diary on his blog and I mean to hold him to it, as the project interests me. Perhaps I should do the same, even though the entries might be too similar.

Well, anyway...

Viewed:

Preston Sturges' "Unfaithfully Yours"

Preston Sturges' "Easy Living":

"Milk"

re-read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick:

from page 201:

To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.

Boots of the Czars

(photo from Time magazine)

I'm feeling somehow like I need these.

A new word

Limerence

Art is Weeds

an article by my father, Glenn Gordon

Let's twist for this is life